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Saturday, October 19, 2013

The importance of meetings

The
importance of meetings

The importance of meetings
is that people meet. Today we have to change that a old adage a bit, because
people can also “meet” over video conference and webcast and text
conferencing;all these have value, but
from my perspective are not the same as a good old fashioned face-to-face meeting and having the opportunity to share
common live experiences.

Over the last few days we
have been hosting the Quality Management Conference for Medical Laboratories
here in Vancouver.We have about 130 people
here, talking, eating, and sharing experience in one room. The audience included the full spectrum of
laboratory professionals interested in laboratory quality.There were laboratory technologists,
administrators, leaders and directors, investigators and consultants, and of
course, very important, partners and sponsors.There were presentations and discussion, agreement and (respectful)
disagreement, and good food and entertainment.

It was, from my very biased
perspective, a very successful meeting of tangible minds in a live reality
experience.

F-t-F meetings are actually
becoming a lot harder to orchestrate, at least in Canada because resources for
hosting meetings and resources for attending meetings are shrinking.Both the public sector and private sector are
feeling the squeeze.But laboratory
administrations do need to recognize that Quality improvement does not happen
in a vacuum; improvement needs to be linked to continuing education.Education without meetings can and does
occur, but books and webcasts and staring at a computer can go only so
far.And while I appreciate that
industry is under its own set of pressures from competition and Merger and Acquisition
(M&A), cutting off its audience doesn’t make things better; it makes things
worse.A single meeting brings the
sponsor together with a hundred or more contacts.Everybody wins.

There were a number of
themes that arose during the two and a half days:

·There
are links between medical laboratory quality and standardization in all its
guises.

·Quality
and Safety and Risk and Error are intimately linked and improved through appropriate
application of Quality tools

·The critical
role for Quality education at all levels.(over all consensus is that starting on-the-job is way too late!)

·Laboratory
Quality has huge impact on patient care, and its corollary, patients can and do
make their mark on laboratory management through voicing concerns and compliments
and complaints.

More information to follow.

This was not our “first
rodeo”; over the years we have put on about 25 conferences.This was our most ambitious, and from many
perspectives, our most successful.

The presentations will soon
all be posted and we will share the link.

Our most immediate task is
to make sure people fill in the Evaluation form.I don’t know why, but getting that part done
is often like pulling teeth.I am hoping
that we can get to 15%, but even that may turn out to be a lot of work.

I am starting to think we have to start building in
incentives for submitting an evaluation.I